‘Tired, overworked’: Police officers refuse tasks in southwest Sydney

“Tired, overworked” police in one capital city say they are being called to jobs that others should do – and this request tipped them over the edge.

NSW police are refusing to carry out certain jobs on Wednesday over claims they are overworked.

Officers from at least seven areas in western and southwestern Sydney are taking part.

Those areas are Auburn, Bankstown, Burwood, Camden, Campbelltown, Cumberland and Fairfield.

Channel 7 reports the officers will not be doing random breath tests or bail checks – except for high-risk domestic violence offenders. Truancy checks for schools, parking disputes and animal complaints are also reportedly on the non-critical list of jobs not being done.

Officers from key western Sydney stations are taking part. Picture: NewsWire / Gaye Gerard

Officers were refusing tasks that the association deemed should be carried out by another authority. NSW Police Association president Kevin Morton said officers had recently been called to a shopping centre to capture a blue-tongue lizard.

Channel 7 also reports the officers are frustrated at being stretched to cover the weekly pro-Palestine rallies every Sunday.

“They’re feeling tired, they’re feeling overworked and this excess workload that they’re doing is really dragging them down,” Mr Morton told Channel 9.

“When you turn up to the start of your shift with 40 jobs outstanding and you look at those jobs and see that generally half of them shouldn’t be a police response, that really affects our members mentally,” he said.

“When you’re dealing with animal complaints or parking complaints, even low-level mental health issues, they are not police responses and police shouldn’t be attending.”

NSW Police Association president Kevin Morton says officers are being overworked with jobs that should be handled by other agencies. Picture: NewsWire / Gaye Gerard

NSW Police Commissioner Karen Webb said there would be no risk to the public and urgent responses would be responded to as normal.

The police, government and union would work together so “officers are able to fulfil their core function of maintaining public safety”, she said.

NSW Police were already working internally to triage jobs allocated to police to more appropriate agencies and “identify tangible changes to make police taskings more manageable in the short term”, Ms Webb said.

The force has introduced schemes to pay students at the police academy, attract officers from interstate and an entitlement to be stationed in an officer’s hometown.

Since paid recruitment was announced in October 2023, applications were up 54 per cent, Ms Webb said, with 650 recruits due to graduate in December and April.

“Further, I recently asked the executive team to hold high-level discussions on potential strategies to relieve the pressure on frontline police and report back to me with possible solutions,” she said.